Chapter 18

Suspended animation is nothing new, not alone in the vegetable world
and in the lower forms of animal life, but in the highly evolved,
complex organism of man himself. A cataleptic trance is a
cataleptic trance, no matter how induced. From time immemorial the
fakir of India has been able voluntarily to induce such states in
himself. It is an old trick of the fakirs to have themselves buried
alive. Other men, in similar trances, have misled the physicians,
who pronounced them dead and gave the orders that put them alive
under the ground.

As my jacket experiences in San Quentin continued I dwelt not a
little on this problem of suspended animation. I remembered having
read that the far northern Siberian peasants made a practice of
hibernating through the long winters just as bears and other wild
animals do. Some scientist studied these peasants and found that
during these periods of the "long sleep" respiration and digestion
practically ceased, and that the heart was at so low tension as to
defy detection by ordinary layman's examination.

In such a trance the bodily processes are so near to absolute
suspension that the air and food consumed are practically
negligible. On this reasoning, partly, was based my defiance of
Warden Atherton and Doctor Jackson. It was thus that I dared
challenge them to give me a hundred days in the jacket. And they
did not dare accept my challenge.

Nevertheless I did manage to do without water, as well as food,
during my ten-days' bouts. I found it an intolerable nuisance, in
the deeps of dream across space and time, to be haled back to the
sordid present by a despicable prison doctor pressing water to my
lips. So I warned Doctor Jackson, first, that I intended doing
without water while in the jacket; and next, that I would resist any
efforts to compel me to drink.

Of course we had our little struggle; but after several attempts
Doctor Jackson gave it up. Thereafter the space occupied in Darrell
Standing's life by a jacket-bout was scarcely more than a few ticks
of the clock. Immediately I was laced I devoted myself to inducing
the little death. From practice it became simple and easy. I
suspended animation and consciousness so quickly that I escaped the
really terrible suffering consequent upon suspending circulation.
Most quickly came the dark. And the next I, Darrell Standing, knew
was the light again, the faces bending over me as I was unlaced, and
the knowledge that ten days had passed in the twinkling of an eye.

But oh, the wonder and the glory of those ten days spent by me
elsewhere! The journeys through the long chain of existences! The
long darks, the growings of nebulous lights, and the fluttering
apparitional selves that dawned through the growing light!

Much have I pondered upon the relation of these other selves to me,
and of the relation of the total experience to the modern doctrine
of evolution. I can truly say that my experience is in complete
accord with our conclusions of evolution.

I, like any man, am a growth. I did not begin when I was born nor
when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through
incalculable myriads of millenniums. All these experiences of all
these lives, and of countless other lives, have gone to the making
of the soul-stuff or the spirit-stuff that is I. Don't you see?
They are the stuff of me. Matter does not remember, for spirit is
memory. I am this spirit compounded of the memories of my endless
incarnations.

Whence came in me, Darrell Standing, the red pulse of wrath that has
wrecked my life and put me in the condemned cells? Surely it did
not come into being, was not created, when the babe that was to be
Darrell Standing was conceived. That old red wrath is far older
than my mother, far older than the oldest and first mother of men.
My mother, at my inception, did not create that passionate lack of
fear that is mine. Not all the mothers of the whole evolution of
men manufactured fear or fearlessness in men. Far back beyond the
first men were fear and fearlessness, love, hatred, anger, all the
emotions, growing, developing, becoming the stuff that was to become
men.

I am all of my past, as every protagonist of the Mendelian law must
agree. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings
in me. My every mode of action, heat of passion, flicker of thought
is shaded, toned, infinitesimally shaded and toned, by that vast
array of other selves that preceded me and went into the making of
me.

The stuff of life is plastic. At the same time this stuff never
forgets. Mould it as you will, the old memories persist. All
manner of horses, from ton Shires to dwarf Shetlands, have been bred
up and down from those first wild ponies domesticated by primitive
man. Yet to this day man has not bred out the kick of the horse.
And I, who am composed of those first horse-tamers, have not had
their red anger bred out of me.

I am man born of woman. My days are few, but the stuff of me is
indestructible. I have been woman born of woman. I have been a
woman and borne my children. And I shall be born again. Oh,
incalculable times again shall I be born; and yet the stupid dolts
about me think that by stretching my neck with a rope they will make
me cease.

Yes, I shall be hanged . . . soon. This is the end of June. In a
little while they will try to befool me. They will take me from
this cell to the bath, according to the prison custom of the weekly
bath. But I shall not be brought back to this cell. I shall be
dressed outright in fresh clothes and be taken to the death-cell.
There they will place the death-watch on me. Night or day, waking
or sleeping, I shall be watched. I shall not be permitted to put my
head under the blankets for fear I may anticipate the State by
choking myself.

Always bright light will blaze upon me. And then, when they have
well wearied me, they will lead me out one morning in a shirt
without a collar and drop me through the trap. Oh, I know. The
rope they will do it with is well-stretched. For many a month now
the hangman of Folsom has been stretching it with heavy weights so
as to take the spring out of it.

Yes, I shall drop far. They have cunning tables of calculations,
like interest tables, that show the distance of the drop in relation
to the victim's weight. I am so emaciated that they will have to
drop me far in order to break my neck. And then the onlookers will
take their hats off, and as I swing the doctors will press their
ears to my chest to count my fading heartbeats, and at last they
will say that I am dead.

It is grotesque. It is the ridiculous effrontery of men-maggots who
think they can kill me. I cannot die. I am immortal, as they are
immortal; the difference is that I know it and they do not know it.

Pah! I was once a hangman, or an executioner, rather. Well I
remember it! I used the sword, not the rope. The sword is the
braver way, although all ways are equally inefficacious. Forsooth,
as if spirit could be thrust through with steel or throttled by a
rope!